Is Israel the Last Jewish Ghetto?

Faisal Husseini said that “peace will dissolve Israel by itself.” Imagine that after Gaza, most of Judea and Samaria were to be handed over to the Palestinians in a settlement with Israel’s neighbors. Then heard in the UN General Assembly, at Arab League meetings, in the European media, at summit meetings of the superpowers and all round the world’s parliaments: “The legitimate rights of the Arabs of Israel must be met.” It’s the “return” of Western Galilee, of a large part of the Negev, Jaffa, Acre, Nahariya. Jerusalem then must become an international city run by the Vatican for the benefit of all religions. Then, the Zionist ghetto of Tel Aviv and the Sharon plain must also be “returned” to the new Arab nation called Coastal Palestinians.

A fascinating novel written by the Dutch best-selling author Leon de Winter, titled “The Right of Return,” perfectly tells the story of Israel’s imagined ghetto. The Hebrew publishing houses refused to publish the book because it is meant to awaken the public to the dangers surrounding Israel. De Winter’s novel describes a State of Israel in 2024 that is reduced to the City-Ghetto of Tel Aviv. Even adjoining Jaffa is cut off from the city.

De Winter describes an Israel that is basically the area of greater Tel Aviv, with the northern part of the Negev, including Dimona. The north is gone, the south is gone, Jerusalem is gone. No Jews are living in Judea and Samaria. What’s left is a heavily fortified and secured but small area. Cameras and drones keep vigil on the Jewish population, and the journey into the unprotected Palestinian-dominated territories requires passing through check-points that are far more heavily secured than contemporary ones.

The book has a desperate undertone.

De Winter doesn’t tell us what happened, whether Israel shrinks because of a “peace process” (the old PLO “phased plan” to utilize every inch of “liberated” Arab soil as a springboard to the rest) or because of the Islamic war of attrition. The main focus of the book is on Bram Mannheim, a Dutch Jew who makes aliyah when he is 18 and becomes, at a young age, a celebrated leftist professor. He teaches history of the Middle East at the ultra-leftist Tel Aviv University. But tragedy hits when, in 2008, he has moved to Princeton with his wife and young son to become a professor there. His 4-year-old son disappears. Bram turns into a psychotic transient wandering around in the States. His father finds him and brings him back to Tel Aviv. In 2024, Bram runs a bureau that helps parents of children who have disappeared as well in this Jewish ghetto-city called Israel.

The late Dr. Yisrael Eldad once said about the possibility that Israel is ghettoizing itself by giving away Judea and Samaria: “That’s why we’re going to give back the territories: Jews can’t tolerate air and space!” Since the Arab masses don’t want peace without “Ashdod, Beit She’an, Haifa, and Jerusalem,” as the Palestinians chant at their rallies, Israel today faces two alternatives: either a Jewish fortress protected by the Golan-Samaria-Judea mountain ranger, or Shimon Peres’ “Brave New Israel,” or as others like to call it, the “Hong Kong of the Middle East” or “a new Benelux.” It is a badge of honor for the “settlers” that they stand in the way. They represent the only obstacle to Israel as the last Jewish ghetto. To Israel’s final liquidation.

Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book, "A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism."

Nahum Katz

So well written! Thank you Mr. Meotti, you lead the Israeli public opinion makers

http://www.facebook.com/hanno.phoenicia Hanno Phoenicia

A historically ignorant article. A ghetto isn't defined by walls. I live in a gated community with security which consists of luxury apartments. A walled city in history protects it's prosperity and safety in this manner. A wall is for safety and/or privacy and has nothing to do with the ghetto concept. A ghetto is based on poverty and imposed isolation from others, and doesn't require a wall. The poor neighborhoods that exist in every American city are labeled as Ghettos but have no walls. The original ones sometimes did, irrelevant to modern definitions.
Israel is simply a larger version of a walled city, nothing else. The author of the article was using a poor metaphor that was in bad taste and inaccurate.

Sage on the Stage

With the help of the murderous Muslim Brotherhood, their Al-Qaeda lackeys, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, Obama has expertly choreographed Israel's isolation from Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. Thus Israel has been in some sense, effectively "ghettoized" despite the fact that it's not a poor country. Your example of poor neighborhoods in American cities supports your case, but poor neighborhoods in American cities aren''t threatened by Grad rockets and murderous terrorist jihadi groups.

bubbaland1

Spot on. Israel is a well fortified ghetto.

Fred Dawes

Yes it is and within 20 years or before the monkey muslims will own Israel and about the same time the hispanics will own the so called USA Its is a fact the sad part is we Americans let it happen and so did the jews on a cheerful note I will be dead so the monkeys of south America can't kill me or behead me. But you do understand what the monkeys will do to your kids?

Marty

This "ghetto" is qualitatively different from those that came before. Israelis simply and necessarily enhanced their personal and national security. Any other country would do this if surrounded by genocidal sociopaths whose mission in life is to slaughter innocent men, women, and children (including infants). Protecting oneself with walls is not the Israeli preference (which is to live in genuine peace), but it is preferable tbetter than the alternative – relentless and lethal attacks from cowardly terrorists who are firm believers in the anti-semtic death cult of islam and whose murderous anti-semitism is obvious to all except for the American government and most of the media.

SCREW SOCIALISM

Israel is as much of a "ghetto" as any other sovereign nation that defends its borders and defeats its attackers.

Israel is under physical attack and ideological attack.

Time for a counter offensive – a counter jihad – resistance to islamofascism and socialism.

Schlomotion

I don't think so. Really, the walls to compare it to are the Berlin Wall, the North Korean side of the DMZ, the walls of a gated community, or the walls of an Auschwitz that Israel built to contain themselves. It's really pathetic. This is what you get when you espouse a collectivist utopian political ideology that involves racial purity, economic exclusivity, and a desire to rebuild an ancient fortified kingdom from 800 BC. You get a Jewish Citadel with concentration camp flourishes. As Ayn Rand would say, if your priorities are backward and self-sabotagingly primitive, if left to your own devices, you will succeed in building your failure to exact specifications.

And your constant Jew hatred bothers me to no end,Schlomotion. You probably drool at the chance for the Muslim world to kill more Jews,don't you,you inhuman monster.

Choi

Just tell him to FK himself.
He's a POS TROLLING HATEMONGER.
When he posts a FU to us,the answer is a BIGGER FU to him.
He would rather be identified as an "inhuman Monster",than the POS he is,and HE IS!

Matt

It is all perceptions, some people will say that, it does not really matter what they think or say. We see it more of a Berlin Wall GDR to keep people out not in, more like a castle than a ghetto. Like the Eilat railway people think it a joke. Let them, the PRC do not think it is a joke, the Chinese are good at doing things not writing reports and think tanks, committees. As soon as Mubarak fell an it has gone from that to being built in 5 years an in operation.